This week I had the the opportunity to speak at the LinkDex Author ThinkTank in Leeds and gave a brief guide on how to get the author rich snippet in Google’s search results.

At the event I promised to follow-up with a blog post that explained the process in more detail. So here we go:

The rich snippet

For me and many of the people I’ve spoken to, the current - and I want to emphasise the word current - biggest benefit of Google Authorship is the author rich snippet.

The snippet gives you the opportunity to have a picture of an author along with their name and the amount of Google+ circles they are in as part of search results. In a landscape where the battle for real estate is ever fiercer, this is potentially of great benefit. With some people even seeing an increase in click-through rates of up to 30%.

How to get the author rich snippet

Method One

1. You must have a Google+ Account (duh!)
2. Within your article, you need to have the words ‘by Author’s name’, e.g. ‘By Matthew Hall’. This name should match the name within your Google+ profile.
3. Now go to http://plus.google.com/authorship and verify an email address from the same domain as the website you’re posting the content on. If you don’t have this, please see Method 2 below.
4. Test your work with the Structured Data Testing Tool (http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets) available within Google Webmaster Tools. Hopefully you’ll see something similar to the example below.

Method Two

1. Again, the first step is to have Google+ account
2. Link back to your Google+ profile page, with the parameter ?rel=author to let Google know that you’re the author of the article, using your name as the anchor text. Be careful not to include the /posts/ within the link back to your profile.
   E.g. <a href=”https://plus.google.com/105446897923143504577?rel=author”>Matthew Hall</a>.
3. The final step is to add this to your ‘Contributor to’ section within Google+. To do this simply go to Google+ and ‘Edit Profile’. Under the ‘About’ section you’ll find the ‘Contributor to’ area where you simply post a link back to the website.
4. Once again test using the Structured Data Testing Tool (see step 4 above).

Handy WordPress Plug-ins

The benefit of having a site built on WordPress is that plugins can do a lot of the work for you, and this is indeed the case with the Google author rich snippet

The first plugin to look at is the Google Author Link plugin. After uploading this plugin, simply go to a user’s profile on the blog and add a link to their Google+ profile, then go to the contributor to section and post a link back to your site. This plugin is especially useful as it works for both single and multi-user WordPress blogs.

The second plugin I would recommend, and this is a fantastic tool in general for SEO, is Yoast’s WordPress SEO Plugin. This plugin allows you to add the rel author tag in a slightly different way, but is very useful for blogs which have only one author.

If you have any questions please leave them in the comments below, and once again a big thank you to all those attended this week and made it such a fantastic event.